Last week at Gen Con I had the pleasure of learning a bunch of dumb stuff I didn’t know about Inspector Gadget! And now I will share it all with you.

Like everyone in the world, I watched the television program as a kid, and chuckled along to the antics of the terrible lawman and his orphan ward and cryptid dog. I knew about the two live-action movies as well, though I’ve never actually watched them all the way through. And I vaguely knew that there were some various other Gadget adaptations out there.

NOW, however, I know all that AND these six other things, which I will share with you now:

THING ONE: Inspector Gadget had a moustache in the original pilot, but DiC (the production company) was sued by MGM because he too closely resembled their own Inspector Clouseau.

Rather than re-animating the pilot, a line of dialogue was added to later showings, in which Penny comments on the moustache and Gadget says: “It’s so that nobody will recognize me. I’m on vacation, absolutely, totally and completely off duty.”

Here’s the original version of the opening theme with the moustache present: [On YouTube]

THING TWO: In the 1999 live-action movie, there is a scene in which Inspector Gadget covers a lady with 100 gallons of toothpaste. It’s just as terrible as it sounds:

I agree with one of the YouTube commenters: “Why would they even put that much toothpaste in him anyway? How often is he gonna come across a situation that requires a crap load of toothpaste like that?”

THING THREE: There have been THREE spinoff television shows since the original:

• Gadget Boy & Heather (1995–1998), in which the brain of an adult policeman has been placed into the body of a child for some reason, and the child given all the typical crimefighting gadgets. The villain is an 8-armed spider-lady named Spydra. [On YouTube]

• A current CGI version of Inspector Gadget (2015–present), a “sequel” to the original, presently available on Netflix in the US. In this version, Dr. Claw has a teenaged nephew, whom Penny has a crush on. [On YouTube]

There have also been two animated movies: 2002’s Inspector Gadget’s Last Case [wiki/YouTube], which features Jaleel White (Urkel) as Gadget’s car, and 2005’s Inspector Gadget’s Biggest Caper Ever [wiki/YouTube], which features Bernie Mac as Gadget’s car.

For this live-action segment, Gadget was played by Maurice LaMarche, who would go on to voice Gadget in several of his other animated incarnations once Don Adams had retired from the character (and from this world).

If anyone can make it through the entire thing, let me know what happens.

THING FIVE: There are, surprisingly, not that many interesting covers of the Inspector Gadget theme song on YouTube, but this one done in Mario Paint is rather charming:

I particularly like its judicious use of the Yoshi sound effect.

THING SIX: Speaking of the Inspector Gadget theme song, it turns out that the one we in the English-speaking world all know so well is merely a VASTLY INFERIOR ITERATION when you learn that in other languages, IT HAS MORE LYRICS.

I’m super charmed by the mention of both Gadget “hand” and “fist” (they’re different?), and then the mysterious “Elastico-Gadget.” It sounds like it could be his springy legs, but the video shows his helicopter hat at that point! WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON.

Recently, reader Julie M. contacted me to ask if I could make a commissioned portrait as a gift for her husband’s birthday.

I rarely attempt portraits — and I’d never tried to make an actual likeness in the Wondermark collage style, where one is limited to the source material one can unearth — but in this case, I happened to get lucky in my search, and was able to create something approaching a resemblance from chunks of about five different source images and judicious use of the Photoshop warp tool.

Plus, Julie’s husband is a pilot, and there are few things that can get me more excited about a commission than the prospect of making a weird Victorian airplane collage.

I think it turned out quite well! (Click the plane for a closer look.)

All that is well and good, and I would have been happy to leave it there and chalk it all up to a lovely experience.

BUT HISTORY HAD TO SHOW ME UP.

The other day I saw this tweet from the fascinating account @SovietVisuals: